Midtown moving forward with progress, challenges

Tuesday

Jun 25, 2013 at 12:01 AMJun 25, 2013 at 4:34 PM

When residents in the city's center focus on their own streets, they have a few new signs of hope to grab onto.

EILEEN ZAFFIRO-KEANSTAFF WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH— When people in the Midtown neighborhood look to the east, they see the oceanfront being resurrected with new rides, Joe's Crab Shack and major condo hotel projects. When they gaze west, they see International Speedway Corp. positioning for a massive reinvention of the track's frontstretch grandstands and hundreds of surrounding acres. When residents in the city's center focus on their own streets, they have a few new signs of hope to grab onto, also. There's the state-of-the art Midtown Cultural and Education Center that opened a year ago. A new cafe and ice cream shop have sprouted on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and a historic bar on that street has just started a new life as a renovated church. Within the next few months, Daytona Toyota will start building its new $4.5 million body shop and used car center on a vacant car dealership site at the bustling corner of International Speedway Boulevard and Nova Road. Just behind that Toyota development, the first building in a new affordable housing complex on Keech Street is under construction. The city has also invested more than $2 million so far in flood relief projects in the neighborhood, and late this year the city plans to tackle a complete overhaul of Orange Avenue and the aging pipes beneath it from Beach Street to Nova Road. For some Midtown residents, that's enough to keep dreaming of a rebirth of the community just east of Nova Road that has struggled with poverty, blight, vacancies and crime the past several decades. "I can't afford to be frustrated," said City Commissioner Paula Reed, whose zone covers the area that straddles a busy stretch of International Speedway Boulevard. "I've got to be optimistic and forward thinking." For others, it's a letdown of what they hoped the neighborhood would have become by now. "I'm very disappointed in the progress of Midtown," said 80-year-old Sam Rogers, a Midtown native who moved to Miami for his career and came back to the neighborhood for his retirement years.

LOOKING FOR RESULTS

Rogers returned to Midtown nearly 20 years ago, and he spent 12 years serving on the Midtown Redevelopment Area Board and seven years on the city's Planning Board. "We've done planning and had meetings, and there's very little to show for it," said Rogers, who was the first chairman of the 16-year-old Midtown redevelopment board. "The great majority of things we talked about doing has yet to be done. It's 2013 now. We started in 1997." Rogers had a vision of recapturing the Midtown of his childhood, or at least something closer to that, where the main corridors were packed with businesses that drew throngs of customers, residential streets were lined with well-kept homes and those in the tightly knit community looked out for one another. "There was hope we'd be able to attract businesses to the area. That has not happened," Rogers said. The city "acquired property, over 30 acres (throughout Midtown), but nothing has been done with it." With the economy turning around, city commissioners decided at their meeting last week to sell a good share of that Midtown property for private residential and commercial development. For now, Rogers said he sees too much in the neighborhood that's nearly as old as him, and he still doesn't see curb and gutter improvements or the new signage planned years ago. "I really felt there would be more progress," he said. Cynthia Slater, a lifelong Midtown resident and president of the Volusia County-Daytona Beach NAACP, said she's not satisfied with things in the city's center, either. She's dismayed that flooding problems persist in Midtown, she worries fees are too high for most people to use the Midtown Cultural and Education Center and that infrastructure improvements have been neglected for too long.

FIRST STEPS ON THE JOURNEY

Commissioner Reed, who has lived in Midtown for most of her 52 years, and other local leaders say it's not too late to turn things around. Hope has been placed in the new Midtown Redevelopment Master Plan and changes already starting to take place. "It can't all happen at once," Reed said. "You've got to eat the elephant one bite at a time." Most everyone agrees the protracted economic problems that plagued the entire country stifled some new development. But Rogers is among those who also say City Hall hasn't spent enough attention and dollars on Midtown. Some city leaders bristle at that criticism, and point out the millions they've spent in the core area in recent years. The Midtown Cultural and Education Center on George Engram Boulevard, which includes a gym, dance studio and computer lab, cost $4.8 million. The coming Orange Avenue overhaul — which will include new sidewalks, new street lights and power lines being moved underground — will tally around $20 million by the time it's completed in a few years. The city has a $22.5 million plan to attack flooding problems in Midtown by installing large pipes from Butts Pond to the city-owned golf course, where a large pump station will push water to the Halifax River. The city has secured $4 million in federal grants for the Villages at Halifax II, a mixed-income housing project being built on the site of the demolished Daytona Village Apartments on Keech Street.

JUMPING IN AND HELPING

Some Midtown property owners have taken it upon themselves to improve corners of the neighborhood.Belinda McElveen, pastor of Fellowship Church of Praise of Volusia County, turned a 1940s brick building that had once been a popular nightclub into a house of worship. The nightclub was on the Chitlin' Circuit, the group of performance venues that were safe and acceptable for African American musicians, comedians and other entertainers to perform in during the years of racial segregation in the United States. When her church bought the structure in 2009 for $120,000, it had been vacant for years and was in rough shape. The church has since poured $100,000 into renovating the building in the 800 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and bringing it up to code, McElveen said. With the brown bricks painted over with a shade of pink and new landscaping in, the church hopes to hold its first service there within a few weeks. Gib Dannehower, owner of Daytona Toyota, will also boost the area by cleaning up blighted lots passed by thousands of motorists every day. He plans to tear down the old vehicle showroom building fronting International Speedway Boulevard and renovate an existing building a stone's throw away that faces Nova Road. He expects construction of his new body shop and used car operation to be complete in about a year, and to create 40-50 new jobs. "Help is on the way," Dannehower said. Rogers said Midtown residents also need to help themselves. "We as a community probably haven't demanded enough," he said. "We need to be more involved. Get on boards. Attend meetings. You have to be at the table." As frustrated as he is, he's not done helping the area he's called home since the 1930s. "I'm not going to give up hope," Rogers said. "I'll keep prodding and wishing."